Even with all the negativity you guys have thrown at me so far, I still want to try to be civil and respectful. It's actually very painful for me to keep my anger bottled up (it feels like I have ulcers in my mouth and throat now), but I'll try to see if I can't say something reasonable for a change.

Since I've been using a lot of big paragraphs, let me just change my pace here and pose a few brief questions.

Let's say you're making a little over $20,000 a year. One day you and a couple other people making about the same start a company with a good idea, pool your resources, and after a few years, you're each earning about $350,000. Meanwhile, people working for you are earning $10 an hour, which equates to about $18,000 per year after taxes. Is there anything wrong with this picture, and if there is, what is it and why is it wrong?

Regarding the Middle East, what is the difference between being a victim and being an aggressor, and into which category does Israel fit?

Earlier I mentioned that companies do not force you to buy their products, and Sentios said something about an "illusion of choice." Can anyone explain what he's talking about?

There are a number of goods that are actually "secret monopolies" like this. There's a central company that owns almost the entire industry, but releases its product under a multitude of brand names to give the illusion that the market actually is open to competition.

These aren't perfect since they can't be overtly monopolistic, but are largely effective. i.e., again with beer, craft beer exists but they don't have the ability to mass distribute and do not have the funds to allocate into marketing to directly compete against InBev. Instead, they aim for a niche market of beer enthusiasts who've decided to become informed and go beyond mass distribution beers.

Of course, with such examples you could say you can just choose not to buy. But you can imagine how bad it could become if it was something involuntary.

Like, I dunno, for the average person, that once-in-a-lifetime diamond ring? That's probably the most famous example. Diamonds really shouldn't be in demand like this, but due to the social norm you kind of have to buy them for marriage, thanks to the great marketing on the part of DeBeers.

Yet, diamonds aren't actually rare. But DeBeers, the monopoly holder of diamonds, made them valuable.

By buying up all the diamonds on the market and removing them from regular supply to artificially inflate the prices. Their business practices have shifted a bit recently, due to a few areas (China, Russia, and Canada) deciding to overturn the monopoly, but seeing how the incredible mark up still exists, it obviously hasn't actually ended the problem. Not to mention the whole needing a diamond ring thing was made up like only 100 years ago :d

Israel is both a victim and aggressor. The Palestinians (those who've been in Palestine since at least its time as a British Mandate) are mostly victims, though they did get aggressive a few times, so like Israel they aren't completely clean (but at the same time, they aren't exactly under a central government).

Not only would the Palestinians get chased out almost methodicall by the Israel military during the Arab-Israel war, the Arab states attacking Israel during that initial war in the first place was, along with eliminating Israel, also designed to annex the territories promised to Palestinians (the surrounding Arab states don't really have much sympathy for them, honestly speaking).

Both parties have been overtly aggressive in the face of moderate approaches. Half of the flak the Israelites get is because they are a living symbol of foreign intervention in the affairs of the middle east (in addition to the US military bases near Islamic holy sites such as Mecca and Medinah). And of course, the Arabs get a lot of flak now because of perceived, apparent ravenous, violent, barbarism. Or whatever.

Both have fault but both are clearly victims. On the other hand, the Arab states are generally clear aggressors. But they and the Palestinians are apples and oranges, often times.

In the end, they're all just victims suffering from what is essentially a post-colonial problem; things were fine when colonial powers were still strong and could enforce segregation or make oppression completely one-sided, but once they declined the distinctions they put into place--even fictional ones--continue to live on in the power politics.

It's also a problem of neo-colonialism, since the importance of the oil there encourages constant meddling by world powers. The Suez canal even threatened a similar debacle, and was basically averted because Eisenhower knew it wasn't worth getting in a nuclear slug match with the USSR over :P

I mean, the West really likes portraying Muslims as violent. But honestly, most of the time the west is baiting them and getting them angry practically on purpose. Or enabling atrocities. Or even just indirectly causing chaos.

As for taking Jerusalem by force, it was basically meant to be an international city controlled by the UN. But in the ensuing Arab-Israeli war, it came to be split with Jordan occupying East Jerusalem and Israel occupying the rest. In the 6 day war, Israel would occupy the rest of Jerusalem along with the West Bank.

Jay's comments are the only one's I've been giving serious thought to in this thread because he's the only one presenting information and opinions I haven't already heard spouted by "influential figures" on TV or elsewhere before. Independent research more people

I'm gonna necro this, or maybe just post a reply and no one will respond, I'm fine with that, too. I had exam finals until last Sunday, yes, semester finals take place in February here, so I didn't have time to reply when the discussion was still going on in this thread. But I really wanted to mention a few things that weren't mentioned during the Israel related debate.

This will be long and I totally don't mind if no one reads it. It's still on-topic so it's a justified necro.

1) Zionism already started in the second half of the 19th Century and its creators were secular Jews. So not only is it true as Jay says, that religion plays a relatively minor role in the conflict nowadays, the decision to form an Israeli state was ethnically and politically motivated from the very start and religion had rather little to do with it.

One of the most influential zionists was Theodor Herzl, and if you read his book the Jews State published in 1896, you'll notice that a lot of his ideas and theories were very strongly socialist and clearly Karl Marx inspired, so very strongly secular ideologically. This might also be interesting to Ruff, since he very strongly supports the idea of an Israeli state, and very strongly hates Marx's ideas, so he might find it interesting that the latter's slogans originally helped the former gain popularity.

2) Herzl was the one who chaired the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland that took place in 1897. It was there the decision was made for the Jews for a mass migration to settlle in the "Holy Land" or Southern Levant, or whatever you call it. They felt, correctly, that picking this location would gain the most volunteers. The, at that point almost 50 year old, slogan "A land without a people for a people without a land" was often used, even though 400 thousand Arabs lived there. At the end of the 19th century Anti-Semitism was gigantic in Europe especially in Tsarist Russia, so tons of Jews decided to migrate for understandable reasons.

3) The Turkish Empire supported the 2nd Reich and Austo-Hungary during World War I, so after the war ended Great Britain got to decide what to do with the region. And yes, officially the League of Nations was supposed to play a role, but honestly anyone who knows history also knows that all important decisions in the League of Nations were made by Great Britain and France and in this case, the two had completely conflicting interests. In fact, in the years 1918-1929 the schizophrenical British policy for Palestine, started by Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, was to clumsily try to please both the Zionints and the Arabs just so that France wouldn't gain more influence there.

4) As to how how clumsily Britain handled the region here's a run down: they made Herbert Samuel a Zionist and religious Jew, the 1st High Commissioner of Palestine and then were surprised about it causing violent outbursts from the Arabs. In 1929 during a violence outbreak in Hebron, 59 Jews got killed even though British soldiers were stationed there to keep this from happening. During the Arabian Rebellion in the years 1936-1939 the during Royal Air Force bombardments a few thousand people died.

Then when World War II broke out, Great Britain needed secure oil shipments, so they promised the Arab countries surrounding Palestine that they'd pass laws to stop or limit Jewish migration to Palestine. But of course once the war ended there was the whole Holocaust thing, so the Europeans had to offer something to the Jewish community. So as Jay said, Palestine was a "good spot" because it didn't directly interfere with the interests of any of the Great Powers other than Britain, which was a dying empire at that point anyway.

5) Regarding how retarded it is to claim only Muslims resort to terrorism. I'll just mention that in 1946 in the King David Hotel bombing, done by the militant right-wing Zionist underground organization Irgun, 91 people died. Irgun also kidnapped 2 British Sergeants in 1947, killed them and booby trapped their bodies wih explosives. Which just goes to show that in any community that feels it is treated unfairly, some form of extremist terrorist views will eventually surface, including Jewish and Western culture.

6) Both events were PR catastrophes in the UK. So they decided to "let the UN handle it". The end result was the map Jay linked with the glorious "plan" giving the Jews 56% of the Palestine territory to Israel, 43% to the Arab state and Jerusalem being UN administrated. Just prior to the "plan" being announced the Jewish community posessed only 7% of land in Palestine, which was completely unfair no doubt, but this also means that a ton of Arab Herders and Shepherds would lose their land due to the UN plan, which does explain why their grandchildren would be pissed off right now, especially since their current situation is even worse than what would result from the UN plan.

7) The Muslim states surrounding Israel, as explained by Jay, don't feel sympathetic towards the Palestinian Arabs and never really did. In 1948 they attacked Israel because they felt threatened geopolitically, the war which Israel won, resulted in the de facto borders of Israel consisting of everything that the UN intended as their territory, plus the annexed 50% of the land originally intended for the Arab state, which Israel took over during the war. After the war the eastern part of Jerulasem was controlled by Jordan, yet already in 1948, Israel announced Jerusalem as their new capital, which went against the UN plan it agreed to a year earlier, and was never internationally recognised.

8) Israel took control of Eastern Jerulasem, plus the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heightsin in 1967 during the Six-Day War. Though yes Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Jordan did plan attacks on Israel in 1967, so both in the 1948 and the Six-Day War, Israel did have a justified reason to defend itself, but Jay's statement that Israel took Jerulasem by force, is correct.

P.S. After the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Israel attempted to invoke the Vienna Convention from 1961, which states that diplomats should be stationed in a country's capital, by trying to convince foreign diplomats to move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and thus claim it as internationally recognised lol, but they had little success in convincing the diplomats.

Stanisław Lem wrote:I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.